Educated Women Are Less Vulnerable, Right?

Women held placards during a protest in Mumbai on Dec. 27, 2012, for better safety for women.

Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Women who are well educated and financially independent are often thought to be less vulnerable in domestic relationships. But a new study of Indian women has found the opposite: women who are more educated than their husbands, or who earn more, face a greater threat of domestic violence.

The study, published in Population and Development Review, a quarterly journal of the Population Council, a U.S.-based nonprofit, found that women more educated than their husbands were 28% more likely to suffer domestic violence than women less educated than their husbands. And women who were the sole breadwinners in the family were roughly 48% more likely to face domestic violence than unemployed women whose husbands were employed.

“As the more educated and financially valuable members of their families, these women threaten men’s dominant status,” wrote Abigail Weitzman, the study’s author, a graduate student at New York University. Some men respond with violence, which she described as an assertion of masculinity, and an attempt to regain power in the relationship.

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Educated working women — who are not dependent on their husbands — often find it easier to leave these relationships, she wrote. But in India, the stigma attached to divorce means many stay put. In a country where women make up only about a third of the labor force, some independent women are seen as threatening the gender norm.

Ms. Weitzman’s study is based on data from India’s National Family Health Survey, collected between 2005 and 2006. The survey, which in part targeted Indian women aged 15 to 49, asked questions ranging from employment to domestic violence. Among them: “Does your husband ever slap you?” “Punch you with a fist or something that could hurt you?” “Try to choke you or burn you on purpose?” Ms. Weitzman examined the occurrence, frequency and severity of the reported violence in married women.

Domestic violence is not uncommon in India. A recent study by the National Council for Applied Economic Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, found that many women would be beaten for reasons as petty as leaving the house without permission. Some 35% of women interviewed said that not cooking properly could result in physical abuse.

Ms. Weitzman’s is one of several recent studies that shows a correlation between domestic violence and women’s empowerment in India — and evincing the underside of growing gender equality.

A working paper by two economists, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that increased property rights for Indian women increased the incidence of wife beating. It also found that better property rights raised female suicide rates.

Those findings suggest that gender equality can accentuate household tensions, wrote the paper’s authors, economists Siwan Anderson and Garance Genicot.

Another NYU graduate student, Poulami Roychowdhury, analyzed domestic violence in India in Gender & Society, a U.S.-based academic journal. Ms. Roychowdhury found that “women who are more educated and work more than their husbands are significantly more at risk than their less educated, stay-at-home counterparts.”

“Their greater vulnerability indicates that violence may occur when traditional forms of social control become ineffective,” Ms. Roychowdhury wrote.

The findings “challenge a predominant narrative that links gendered violence in places like India with tradition and cultural stasis,” she wrote. “Instead, it points to the possibility that violence indexes exactly the opposite: social change and resistance.”

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